And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  AFTER A 3 a.m. bus transfer in Virginia, an old man with scarred hands sits down beside Ethan. The man keeps glancing at the urn in Ethan’s lap. Eight hours before, when Ethan boarded the Greyhound upon missing the last Miami-bound Amtrak from Penn Station, he went to stow the urn in the overhead bin. But he couldn’t. Coming out of a year of destructive behavior—filing fruitless lawsuits against his old company, mismanaging his finances, losing his condo—this clinging seems a comparatively benign whim.

  “If you want, I’ll hold it careful for you,” says the old man an hour later. He’s awakened by Ethan’s struggle to leave his window seat while cradling the urn. “Take my word, you’re gonna need both hands in the john. It’s bouncy back there,” the old man says.

  “Thank you,” Ethan says. His voice, unused since he bought his bus ticket, is a croak.

  “Your mama?” the old man asks, respectfully taking the urn.

  Ethan shakes his head.

  “Not your wife?” the old man asks dolefully.

  This time Ethan doesn’t respond.

  After the lavatory, when he’s back in his seat with the urn, “Fiancée,” he says to simplify things.

  The old man nods then shuts his eyes.

  “I’m taking her to her father,” Ethan says.

  The man opens his eyes. “Oh? That’s hard. Real hard.”

  “Yeah . . . but . . . he never knew her.”

  “What? Never knew his own daughter?”

  “And she never knew about him. Her grandparents kept it a secret.”

  “Well, isn’t that something.” The man closes his eyes again.

  This makes it easier for Ethan to talk. “Now her dad’s the only family she has left.”

  “ ’Cept for you.” Ethan’s companion keeps his eyes shut.

  “To be honest, she wasn’t my fiancée.”

  “Terrible thing when a young person passes.”

  “But I have to do this for her.”

  “Hmm,” says the man, a sleepy therapist.

  “She was the one.”

  The old man begins to breathe deeply through his open mouth. Ethan turns away to the window and watches the shadows of swaying trees. After popping a Xanax, Ethan dozes through the storm.

  SUNLIGHT PIERCES ETHAN’S pupils. The old man is gone. A metal bar in the seat back gnaws his vertebrae. Ethan skims the Times on his laptop then closes the machine. He takes more Xanax and lets the road unroll. A nuclear sunset inaugurates another night. In Orlando he swallows an Ambien and the twilight embraces him.

  The next thing he knows he’s being shaken.

  “End of the line,” the bus driver says.

  “What? . . . What time is it?” It’s dark out.

  “One in the morning.”

  Ethan fumbles between his thighs for Zoe’s canister and finds the brass eerily warm, as if there’s something alive inside. But the heat is only from his own body. Reaching his free hand to the overhead rack he takes down his duffel. Clutching the bag and Zoe’s urn, he steps down into the humid night.

  “South Beach,” he tells a cabbie.

  CHAPTER 42

  Seminole City

  Dear Jessica,

  I am glad beyond tears to read your words. Glad to know that you are okay and free. Glad to learn about your journey from California and hear of your adventures with the brokedown truck and your good dog. But it was dangerous of you to send your new address in a letter to a prisoner. Even if that prisoner was not me.

  Dont get me wrong. I am not worried that Hector is going to rat us out. As my cellmate he has plenty of reasons to keep his mouth shut. The problem with you writing to me through him is that all mail to prisoners is looked at. You have taken a big chance.

  But you knew this. Our writing each other was what started all your troubles.

  Even before this last letter of yours I figured you must be on the run. So there is no need for you to apologize for your long silence. Why else would you have stopped writing to me unless you could not? Why else would you send me a present of music but not dare even a hello?

  Well. I guess there could have been other reasons for you to skip writing. But I believed the worst. That somebody was after you. And not a week ago two FBI men paid me a visit and finally confirmed my bad thoughts.

  If these men are why you left California I can tell you that you made a wise decision. This pair will do anything to grab you and I have stun gun marks and a split nose to prove it. They are why I cant risk giving you away by sending THIS letter. Not even under Hectors name. Not even though you expect me to write.

  It eats my soul that you might think I have turned my back on you. Yet what can I do but hide this letter away with all my other unsent and returned letters. Unless maybe Hector has some advice on the matter. He is a much smarter man than me and I trust him as much as you can another man in prison.

  Be safe and stay free.

  Your loving father,

  Don

  CHAPTER 43

  Fort Lauderdale

  “These are so you don’t end up seeing stars the rest of the day,” the electrologist says.

  The wraparound sunglasses the technician offers Jessica are the functional kind favored by seniors. Their tint turns everything into shades of black and the tattoos on her arms become less visible, as if in anticipation of what she is having done.

  “Wow!” the technician says. “Your phoenix here has a lot of ink.”

  “It’s a sphinx,” Jessica says to the woman, who is cleaning Jessica’s shoulder with something cool and astringent.

  “So the sphinx is a cover-up?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s underneath?”

  “Is it important?”

  “No, not really. Sorry,” says the technician. “I guess that’s why you had it covered up in the first place. So you could forget it. Or him.”

  “It used to be an eagle,” Jessica says, hoping to close the matter.

  “Oh,” says the technician. “You had an ex in the service or something?”

  “Or something,” Jessica says.

  “I hear ya,” says the tech emphatically, commiserating with Jessica over the nonexistent military lover of Jessica that she’s imagining.

  At first the pulsing laser feels merely interesting, like a rubber band snapping her scapula really quickly. Then the sensation gets warmer and the heat congeals into a burning. The odor, of Jessica’s own flesh roasting, is sickly sweet. She licks sweat from her upper lip.

  The electrologist pauses her zapping. “Shall we keep going?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Holler if you’re not.”

  The laser pulses are so rapid they sound like clacking plastic teeth. About an hour of Jessica’s time passes, though it turns out to be only thirty minutes on the clock, before the plastic teeth go quiet.

  “You did good,” says the technician as she helps Jessica up from the table. With her lab coat, green-tinted goggles and cabled laser gun, the woman could be playing a nuclear physicist in an old sci-fi movie. “If you’re up for it, I have time to do an arm today.”

  After twenty, forty and then sixty actual minutes pass, the plastic teeth have nibbled up and down Jessica’s right biceps and forearm. She hears a final clackety-clack and then silence. “That does it for now,” her tormentor says.

  Jessica removes the protective glasses and studies the blasted arm. A crusty blister of dying skin covers the Maori spirals.

  “It’ll be seven more sessions or so to finish this one. The ink is deep,” says the electrologist sympathetically. “We can do the next treatment after you heal. Eight weeks say.”

  “And what about this arm?” Jessica asks, offering up her uncooked limb, the one with the fantastic green and purple foliage. She has saved it for last.

  “Maybe you should rest a day or two. This whole process will take about a year, so there’s no hurry.”

  “I need to get it all started now,” Jessica says.

  It�
��s not the anticipated pain that Jessica fears will change her mind but remorse: at betraying Miss Shelly, and even herself. Her tats are part of her. But the temptation to be anonymous and plain and safe pulls her on.

  “Put on your glasses,” says the electrologist, who lowers her own sci-fi goggles and then raises her laser. Swallowing, Jessica watches darkly as the device bites at Shelly’s canvas.

  CHAPTER 44

  South Beach

  “Jesus, you look like something Lucas Samaras smeared across a canvas,” Alex says. Ethan has called him in Sevastopol and their video link has momentarily turned them into pixilated blurs. The strange tone in Alex’s voice, though, is probably just microphone feedback—Ethan is sitting poolside and, nearby, tween girls are screaming and plunging into the chlorinated water like continuously reanimated virgin sacrifices.

  “I’m in Miami,” Ethan says, as if to excuse their crappy connection.

  “Juliette said you’ve been acting strange, dude. She thinks you’ve lost it. You know, she put a lot of work getting you this opportunity with Sergei. You’re blowing it man,” Alex says. He sounds agitated.

  Ethan figures he’s just interrupted the artist at work, “Did you get the FedEx from her?” he asks.

  Alex’s response lags. “It came. Thanks.”

  “Okay. Good. Now all you have to do is sign the power of attorney and set up a joint account under our names at Sergei’s bank. After that I can start moving your money. I checked the ruble this morning and it’s trending favorably against the yen. So that’s the direction we’ll likely go. And then—”

  “Hey,” Alex says. “Let’s stay on the subject. You’re fucking up your future. You need to get up to Long Island right now. Sergei’s starting to have doubts about you.”

  “But . . . I don’t want to work on the island,” Ethan says, not wanting to go into all his reasons.

  Alex looks away from Ethan’s screen . . . and then back at it. “You need to wake up.”

  Patiently, Ethan absorbs his friend’s irritation. “Okay,” he says.

  “You need to get over this Zoe obsession. Come on! Don’t ruin your life over her.”

  What’s this? Tough love? Ethan thinks, but he keeps his surface calm. “I’m honoring her, Alex. Zoe and I could have built something together.”

  “No, man, that was never going to happen. Not with you and Zoe. And Eth, it wasn’t just what she felt about you. It was you as well. And now you’re dreaming about what never was, carrying her ashes around the country. You didn’t invest that much in the chick when she was alive! Snap out of it!”

  Snap out of it, Ethan thinks. Snap out of it? “You,” Ethan says, actually, physically, seeing red, “snap the fuck out of it.” He leans toward Alex’s image and with both hands smashes down the laptop’s lid.

  “OMG! Did you see that?” one of the tweens shouts.

  “That was totally awesome!” says another.

  The young girls are smirking as though Ethan is more loser than lunatic, like he’s one of those sad types their parents discuss over dinner—jobless Uncle Frank the pothead, or the neighbor whose wife ran off with the lawn man, or the crazy guy who totaled his two-thousand-dollar laptop by the hotel pool.

  CHAPTER 45

  Pompano Beach

  “Sorry, sir. . . . Sorry for bothering you,” Jessica says and hangs up on the babbling stranger. The readout on her prepaid phone, just bought at a Walgreens, is correct. The number she has dialed is, or was, for Shelly’s room. It’s been ten days since Jessica left Shelly, a lifetime for a terminal patient. Now Jessica takes a breath and rings the hospice’s main line.

  “Wait, I see what’s wrong,” the receptionist says over her clicking keyboard. “The patient went home last week.”

  Went home—is this hospice-speak for died? A moan comes out of Jessica.

  “Everything okay back there?” asks the bus driver. Jessica’s in the seat behind him and he brings her back to where she physically is. Riding home up to Pompano Beach. “You need a stop, just say.”

  “No, no,” the receptionist says, bringing Jessica back to California. “Sorry. It’s not that.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Jessica.

  “She was discharged last week,” the receptionist says. “Hold a sec. Here’s someone who knows about it.”

  “Miss Jessie? Is that you? I heard you went away. I am so sorry if it was because of me. Those men came and—”

  “Reggie,” Jessica says, recognizing him finally. “Don’t worry about any of that. Tell me about Miss Shelly?”

  “She decided to live,” Reggie says. “She went back on dialysis.”

  “Thank you. Thank you,” Jessica tells him as if it was his doing. And then she’s tapping Shelly’s home number into the phone. But Jessica doesn’t press dial. She closes the flip phone and gets off at her stop. For now, it’s enough to know that Shelly’s alive.

  Kelso, her landlord as of four days ago, is as usual watering his yard. She thanks him for watching Skittles.

  “No problemo,” Kelso says. “Dogs is good security. Hey, how’d you get burned?”

  The salve on her lasered skin makes the blistering appear nastier than it is.

  “Just getting some tattoos removed.”

  “Some?” Kelso asks, inspecting the breadth of her treatment.

  “All of them,” she corrects.

  Jessica is supposed to avoid the sun and so she takes Skittles up to their efficiency instead of out for an afternoon walk. “Tonight, girl,” Jessica promises. Having bought a Sun Sentinel for the want ads, she spreads the paper on the carpet and begins her job search. She’s digging in. She won’t be running away anymore.

  CHAPTER 46

  South Beach

  It is the witching hour, 2 a.m., the time of night most murders occur. Outside Ethan’s door a crowd in the hall plays musical chairs with their hotel rooms. He pulls a pillow over his head but can’t escape the voices . . . until, finally, the revelers disperse. But he’s goggle eyed—overrested from the depressive daytime nap he’d initiated with a dose of Ambien after his fight with Alex. So there will be no return to unconsciousness for him.

  Ethan sits up and browses the internet on his phone. He learns that the driving time from South Beach to Seminole City Correctional is fifty-six minutes. He also learns that he does not meet the requirements for a prisoner visit since he hasn’t sent in the advance paperwork.

  But there are exceptions. And what is transporting cremains to an inmate if not an exception?

  After he maps the location of a car rental, Ethan’s phone goes dark, its battery dead. He’s hoping his brain will shut down, too. But he starts thinking of Alex.

  Ethan’s anger toward his friend slackens. Clearly, Zoe had been searching for something she couldn’t find in him. Clearly, he had failed to give her the attention she needed. He’d made her secondary to his job, and not even a close second. What an idiot he’d been. What a fucked-up idiot!

  He ought to call Alex, ought to charge his phone. Maybe Alex is trying to reach him right now. But drugged and emotionally wiped, Ethan turns his head on his pillow and gazes at the outline of Zoe’s urn. These are his last hours with her. Alex will have to wait.

  CHAPTER 47

  Pompano Beach

  Having waitressed at a Cracker Barrel while in high school, Jessica knows how to memorize daily specials, roll up silverware inside paper napkins and balance multiple dinner plates on one arm. Jeans and tees aren’t quite the best interview clothes, so on the bus to her interview Jessica stops at a JCPenney for slacks and a long-sleeve blouse—and to ask a cosmetician for help with eye shadow. They settle on a color called Eternal Sunshine. Changing into her new clothes in the store bathroom, Jessica smiles at the mirror.

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Jessica Aldridge,” she practices. It’s a good thing she can come out with her name because with her tattoos covered and her eye sockets high-beam bright, Jessica barely recognizes her reflection.

/>   Down Airpark Road, Phantom Diner is a brick-and-clapboard building with a blue-tiled roof and quaint bay windows. It looks okay, and then Jessica is inside asking about the job.

  “The boss isn’t in yet,” says the day hostess. “We’re not a chain and we don’t have medical,” she adds discouragingly.

  “That’s fine,” Jessica says, smiling as though she’d be happy to work here for free. And truthfully, any lack of probing corporate benefit paperwork is all right by her. In a quiet corner Jessica fills out the one-page application.

  When she turns in the sheet the hostess, glancing it over, doesn’t inquire about her yearlong employment blank but merely says, “So long.” If this hard young woman has anything to say about it, Jessica will not be getting the job.

  CHAPTER 48

  Seminole City

  Stubbornness with the guard at the prison gate gets Ethan into the warden’s antechamber, a room as institutional as a principal’s office. Likewise, a woman assailing an ancient keyboard attached to a boxy monitor incites further déjà vu. When her dot matrix printer begins to rattle out a sheet, Ethan is a sophomore again, in need of a hall pass. In this case his pass is the visitation request paperwork to see prisoner 82747L, Donald Alan Aldridge.

  “That’s all we can do till the warden gets back,” the efficient woman says when Ethan turns in the completed form. “He shouldn’t be ten minutes now. You’re quite welcome to wait here, Mr. Winter.”

  “Thank you,” says Ethan and settles onto a bench near the outer door. An overhead vent blows pleasantly cool air down his collar.

  Forty minutes later, a tall man in a gray suit bursts in and hurries across the anteroom. “Hold my calls, Ann,” he says without noticing Ethan. With a second bang the man disappears into the inner office.

  “The warden,” Ann whispers unnecessarily. Her newly creased brow confirms that her boss is in a bad mood. At a double ring she snatches up her handset.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get him on the line right away.” Ann signals for Ethan to be patient, then she dials a number. “Agent Daugherty,” she says to her caller. “Warden Eli Wagner at Seminole City Correctional would like a word. Hold on, please.”